Time To Brainstorm Energy Self-sufficiency Model Like The Seville Way.

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“Climate change is destroying our path to sustainability. Ours is a world of looming challenges and increasingly limited resources. Sustainable development offers the best chance to adjust our course.”

It is the spring season in the city of Seville, Spain. The orange trees look enchanting but the natives do not eat the bitter fruit. Oranges that are grown on local farms are exported to Britain for making marmalade. Though the oranges add colour and fragrance to the city’s streets, they also create a mess leading to a huge cleanup job. Now, the city is planning to put around 5.7 million kilos of unwanted oranges into electricity. Emasesa (a municipal water company) has launched a scheme where around 200 workers collect the oranges and also the oranges deposited by the public from the numerous containers that would be used to generate biogas.

This “Pilot Scheme” deploys 35 tonnes of orange fruits to produce clean energy meant to run a water purification plant. The process is simple wherein the fermentation of oranges leads to methane production and the same further drives the generator. The peels and the rest of the fruit would be used as compost or fertilizer. Interestingly, the city council employs approximately 200 people for the fruit collection. As of now, the focus is clearly on running the water purification plant but eventually, the city aims to channelize the surplus energy into the grid. The trials have demonstrated that 1000kg of fruits is competent in producing 50kWh that suffices to provide electricity to a minimum of 5 homes/day. This indicates that if all of the oranges of the city are recycled, approximately 73,000 homes can be powered. 

           A representative of the mayor has stated that the city aims to encourage careful “Biowaste collection”, increase the recycling rate, spread awareness of management of waste and reduce the amount of waste that is sent to landfills. 

From the Editor-in-Chief

Every year, with the arrival of spring the scent of orange blossom (Azahar) begins to fill the beautiful streets of Seville. However, by the time, winter arrives, the aromatic scent metamorphosis into a nightmare for pedestrians as well as the city’s cleaning department as well owing to the mess in the form of fruits scattered all over the city’s streets. The bitter oranges when fall from the tree are squashed by the wheels of four-wheelers thereby ruining the beauty of the streets as they become sticky due to juice thereby attracting a swarm of flies. 

Finally, the government has come up with an innovative solution in the form of the aforesaid mentioned “Pilot Scheme” meant to generate clean electricity from the methane produced by the Orange. The head of the environmental department of Emasesa “Benigno López” further stated that “We hope that soon we will be able to recycle all the city’s oranges,”. For the same, he opines that the city would require investing somewhere close to €250,000.

“The juice is fructose made up of very short carbon chains and the energetic performance of these carbon chains during the fermentation process is very high,” he said. “It’s not just about saving money. The oranges are a problem for the city and we’re producing added value from waste.”

The mayor of Seville (Juan Espadas Cejas) stated while addressing a press conference during the project launch, “New investment is especially directed at the water purification plants that consume almost 40% of the energy needed to provide the city with drinking water and sanitation,”. 

“To truly transform our economy, protect our security, and save our planet from the ravages of climate change, we need to ultimately make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy.”

Rooted in sustainability, this intriguing model of Emasesa has to offer a lot of wisdom in the context of “Climate Change”. A remarkable endeavour of emission reduction, circular economy and energy self-sufficiency, does this “Pilot Project” sounds intriguing to you?